The Post-transcriptional Operon

A post-transcriptional operon is a set of monocistronic mRNAs encoding functionally related proteins that are co-regulated by a group of RNA-binding proteins and/or small non-coding RNAs so that protein expression is coordinated at the post-transcriptional level. The post-transcriptional operon model (PTO) is used to describe data from an assortment of methods (e.g. RIP-Chip, CLIP-Chip, miRNA profiling, ribosome profiling) that globally address the functionality of mRNA. Several examples of post-transcriptional operons have been documented in the literature and demonstrate the usefulness of the model in identifying new participants in cellular pathways as well as in deepening our understanding of cellular responses.